One of the major problems in online advertising is that it takes a long time for a campaign to go live. Two of the main factors driving this problem are: involvement of many people and stakeholders, and complex creatives. A creative refers to the content of an advertisement which is displayed on a web site.
The first main factor is illustrated in FIG. 1. A typical campaign process is as follows: an advertiser (advertiser 115) comes up with a campaign, campaign goals, and campaign budget to promote a product or service. The advertiser works with an agency (agency 105) to arrive at a media plan which includes media buys (i.e., ad buys) across a series of publishers (e.g., publisher 100). The agency then negotiates these buys with the various publishers and sends orders to them once negotiations are completed.
During this process the agency sends campaign goals, target market information and creative specifications to a creative agency/designer (designer 110) to come up with a creative strategy and story boards (step 120). Once created (step 125), the designer sends the creative strategy and story boards back to the agency to assess whether the creative strategy matches the campaign goals (step 130). If not, the agency sends feedback to the designer (step 135), who revises the strategy and story boards (step 140) and sends them back for further review. If so, the agency forwards the creative strategy and story boards to the advertiser to assess whether the strategy matches the goals and company image (step 145). If not, the advertiser returns the strategy and boards to the agency with comments (step 150), at which point the agency forwards the feedback to the designer (step 135) for revised strategy and story boards (step 140). If so, the advertiser approves the creative strategy and story boards (step 155).
Upon the advertiser's approval, the agency gives approval for the design of the creatives to the designer (step 160), who then generates the creatives (step 165). The designer sends the generated creatives to the agency, who sends them on to one or more publishers (step 170). The publisher checks to make sure the creatives are within the proper specifications (step 175), and if they are, the publisher books and delivers the creatives on its ad serving system (step 180). If not, the publisher sends the creatives with feedback to the agency (step 185), who forwards the feedback to the designer (step 190). The designer redesigns the creatives (step 195) and forwards them back to the agency, who sends them back to the publisher (step 170).
As illustrated by this process, multiple parties are involved and several pieces of information are exchanged between them. This creates room for error and a complex network of communication among involved groups.
The second main factor driving the increasing length of time for a campaign to go live is the creative complexity. Some creatives are relatively simple and composed of one asset file, such as a graphic file; however, advertisers have recently been using more and more interactive ads called “rich media” ads. Rich media ads differ depending on the technology they use, but are similar in that they are all composed of several asset files. The most common rich media ads are Flash creatives, which are composed of HTML files which display the creative, main SWF files which contains most of the creatives, other child SWF files that contain different parts of the creative, image files which serve as back up content or are called by the different SWF files, and other auxiliary files like audio, video, XML, or text files. A rich media creative can be composed of 2-20 or more different files, which need to be placed and referenced correctly on an ad serving system. Sometimes the creative code needs information which the designer does not have but the agency has—in other cases the publisher has the required information.
Accordingly, there is a need in the art for a system and method for managing the data associated with advertising campaigns in a simple and efficient manner.